No referrers is good news for your website
Howard Lake | 5 October 2005 | News
Software-generated website visitor reports often include statistics for the number of “no referrers”, which can often be a high percentage of visitors. This is in fact good news in most cases and probably indicates that your organisation’s site is being returned to by loyal visitors.
A high percentage of “no referrers” in website traffic logs might be confusing, but is actually something to aim for.
Referrer URLs are listed in a site’s access log whenever a visitor reaches the site from another such as a search engine or any other site with an inbound link to the site. In this way you can track where your visitors are coming from. In many cases this will be from the results page of a search engine.
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A “no referrer” entry can occur for many reasons, as described earlier this year by Dr. Ralph Wilson in his long-standing and useful email newsletter Web Marketing Today®. It can result from someone manually typing in your website’s URL, by opening a web browser with your page set as the default opening page, by someone clicking on a bookmark or favourite in their web browser to visit your page, or by someone clicking through to your site from your email newsletter.
Although there are a few other possible causes, the above four all indicate some degree of positive association with your site. Either your site’s URL is already stored in someone’s browser, someone is explicitly attempting to visit your site rather than ending up there by accident, or they have been encouraged to click through via your email newsletter. At best, a high number of “no referrers” could indicate a large audience of loyal supporters.
Of course, some of these ‘no referrers’ could be you or your colleagues, especially if it is your charity’s policy to set up the charity’s website as the homepage on all staff PCs. So, ‘no referrers’ can only be a truly welcome sign if your site is attracting large numbers of unique visitors.
So, how many unique visitors and ‘no referrers’ has your site recorded recently?
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.